Caspar and Lonnie: The Saga Continues

Oengus's latest installment in the continuing saga of Caspar the Amicable Ghost and Lonnie the Dead Hippie Preacher. This time they meet a Gnome. Here's a grabber:

They were about ready to give up their search when they entered a particularly hard to reach grassy spot, surrounded on all sides by very thick brush.

"Get off my grass!" came a loud, cross sounding voice from somewhere in the bushes. It startled them.

Caspar started, and Lonnie too, looking around to see from where the voice came. They moved forward to investigate — by which I mean that Caspar floated through and Lonnie hovered above the vegetation.

"Get off my grass you dumb ass ghosts!" came the voice again, louder and grumpier than before, but this time it sounded as if it came in front of them low to the ground.

This post is from September; I'm still catching up. I'm never disappointed for having read the man's ongoing work.

Mistaking Gigantism for Genius

Obama's comparison of his behemothic health care plan with something as brilliant and compact as the iPhone should evoke memories of this O'Rourke piece from a year ago. It's short, so I'll republish the entire thing here illegally without requesting any permission.

Let's Cool It With the Big Ideas
P. J. O'Rourke Jun 19 2012

I don’t have a big idea, and I don’t want one. I don’t like big ideas. And I’m not alone. Distaste for grandiose notions is embedded in our language: “What’s the big idea?” “You and your bright ideas.” “Whose idea was this?” “Me and my big ideas.” “Don’t get smart with me.”

When we say our children are “starting to get ideas,” we’re not bragging. It gives us pause to hear our spouse say “I have an idea!” If our boss says it, we panic unless we’re sufficiently quick-witted to spill coffee on the iPad the boss has just used to Google some portentous concept.

This is not anti-intellectualism. This is experience. The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas—fascism, communism, the atomic bomb. Liberty was also a powerful abstraction in the 20th century. But liberty isn’t a big idea. It’s a lot of little ideas about what individuals want to say and do.

I like little ideas. What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it’s so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I’ve received a spam text. Thomas Edison’s moment of enlightenment could be sketched in a cartoon thought balloon. (Although once government started having deep thoughts about it, we got compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and now I need to don a hazmat suit if the dog knocks over the floor lamp.) There was Henry Ford’s Model T, of modest dimensions, and the bread box–size gizmo that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were fiddling with in the garage. But in 1875, 1879, 1908, or 1976, we wouldn’t have called any of these Big Ideas. We couldn’t foresee their consequences.

We still don’t know what ideas will have which results. But I fear the bigger, the worse. And we’re back in an era of big ideas. Our financiers have very big ideas. The rest of us are left looking for investment advisers clueless enough to be honest.

“Greater than the tread of mighty armies is an idea whose time has come,” said Victor Hugo. In either case, run.

My Little Review of the Little Way of Ruthie Leming is up at the Little Amazon.com website

Here it is. I just know that after reading this wonderful little three-star ("It's OK") review of tLWoRL many people will be led like little lemmings to fall over each other to get their little hands on this little book. Luckily big, mean, old Walmart isn't stocking it, so stampedes–big or little–probably won't happen.

Here are the first two paragraphs.

This is a complicated book, and not so much about death and bereavement as one would expect. There's a reason that William Young blurbed this book as a memoir. A memoir is understood to be autobiographical, and this book is mostly so. However there are several interesting passages, and even some laugh-out-loud funny parts made at the author's expense. If someone wishes to understand the continuing development of the author's patchwork political ideology this is a great book. Otherwise time is better spent elsewhere. Also there is a lot of religious discussion in the book which is only obliquely related to the death of the author's sister.

The first part of the book introduces Ruthie as the wildly popular, outgoing, tomboy sister of the author who, being the opposite was withdrawn, bookish and hung out with his spinster aunts and their cats. He was unpopular in school, and kids were mean to him. Reading between the lines, one can discern that he earned at least some of this mistreatment in the vein of "Harriet the Spy". Ruthie eventually became the homecoming queen and had a steady boyfriend pretty early on, getting married soon after school. The author couldn't wait to shake the dust of the town off his heels and move somewhere where people appreciated him more than his family and the benighted townsfolk.

I hope to write a more extended review on the blog here within the next few weeks. It will be longer, of course. But it will still be little, because littleness is my whole thing right now, and because it will be little compared to the big sigh of relief when I finally finished reading the book. I'm reading Sloth right now, which has me cracking up on every page, and not just a little.

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